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Kaitlin, 2010, owned by the artist: It takes anywhere from a week to a month for Nichols to hunt and peck out a portrait, working from photographs and a line drawing. This series, called “Textural Portraits,” pays homage to women’s-rights heroines by combining historical text with modern images — in this case text from Alice Paul’s equal-rights amendment of 1923 to create the image of Kaitlin, a student of Leslie’s husband, Michael Nichols, an artist who works at the Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green where they live.

Siobhan Liddell, 2011, owned by The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami: Nichols used the grid of the typewriter to create the shirt on Liddell, an artist whom Nichols met in Vermont, but then released the carriage to manually control the key strikes. The artist doesn’t create one feature and then move on to the next. She works across the entire sheet of paper. “You write a whole document on the typewriter,” says Nichols. “I think of a person as a whole document.” Nichols puts the paper back in the typewriter and works it across, or up/down, many times.

Nichols' portrait of Siobhan Liddell.

Underwood: Nichols was the $5 winning bidder on eBay for this Underwood, which she purchased in 2011. The typewriter is bigger than her other machines — a Remington Quiet-Riter and an Olympia De Luxe — and allows her to turn the 9.5-inch square piece of printmaking paper she uses for the portraits on the diagonal. The portrait in the carriage, of artist Jeanne Williamson, is from another series in which Nichols used only the letter “o.”

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Leslie Nichols' manual typewriter.

Tiffany, 2015, not sold: The artist uses words, phrases and letters from the background text to create the images. Tiffany, a student at Western Kentucky University, is formed from a speech by the 19th-century activist known as Sojourner Truth delivered at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851 called “Ain’t I a Woman?” Nichols says “we’re not constantly aware that there are all these factors that have gone into shaping the possibilities and potentials of women — and of people — in the current context of their lives.”

Nichols' portrait of Tiffany, a student at Western Kentucky University.

Lindsay Oesterritter, 2015, in a private collection: In this portrait of Oesterritter, a potter, the artist typed the background text first — in this case, excerpts from “The Enfranchisement of Women” written by Harriet Taylor Mill in 1851 — and then framed in Lindsay’s tuque. She used her Underwood to create the diagonal lines. This is one of her first portraits with an entirely readable background.

Nichols' portrait of Lindsay Oesterritter.

Nadine Pinede, 2015, sold through a gallery: Nichols created the portrait of Nadine, a writer she met at the Vermont Studio Center, four years after she met her and says the portrait came together very quickly. The background text was suggested by Pinede and is from Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. Nichols describes her technique as a “fluid interaction between finding the form of the figure and then staying within the grid of the typewriter.”

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